The Hedgehog and the Fox

APPENDIX TO THE SECOND EDITION

I am probably a fox; I’m not a hedgehog.

Isaiah Berlin¹

IB ON HF

To Edmund Wilson, 1 September 1951

The central theme derives from the proposition by Archilochus – an isolated fragment – which I think I quoted to you on Cape Cod where he says ‘the fox knows many things; but the hedgehog one big thing’. Which means, I daresay, no more than that the fox has many tricks but the hedgehog, one worth all of that & can’t be captured. But perhaps it isn’t too improper to divide writers into foxes (Shakespeare: Goethe: Aristotle & other seers of many things:) hedgehogs who see only one big usually incomplete thing (Plato, Pascal, Proust, Dostoevsky, Henry James etc.) anyway it is no worse than naïve v. sentimental & other such categories & dichotomies. Tolstoy I maintain was by nature & gifts a fox who terribly believed in hedgehogs & wished to vivisect himself into one. Hence the crack inside him which everyone knows. This I tried to work out in terms, partly, not of Stendhal or Rousseau, his official inspirers, but Joseph de Maistre who is a far more interesting Nietzschian pseudo-Catholic sort of man than anyone thinks.

To his US publisher Lincoln Schuster, 13 June 1953

I am naturally delighted that you should think so highly of The Hedgehog and the Fox and hope that it will not prove financially disastrous to you. In the meanwhile I have added two further sections to the original which appeared in the Oxford volume of Slavonic Studies.¹ I hope they will not spoil the rest too much. They deal with what Tolstoy and de Maistre meant by such concepts as ‘inexorable’ and ‘inevitable’ and move de Maistre a little more into the picture which earns him that place in the subtitle,² which otherwise seemed a little odd. Is there anyone else in the world besides yourself and me who does not think that Tolstoy’s long epilogues and philosophical excursuses are tedious interruptions of the story? Typical Russian amateur home-made bits of eccentric philosophy?

To his ex-pupil and friend Shiela Sokolov Grant, 29 January 1954

People seem to find obscurities in the Hedgehog. It seems to me terribly clear to the point of sheer platitude.

To H. Paul Simon, University of Toronto, 27 May 1971

I think that you truly believe that I prefer foxes to hedgehogs, but this is not so. No greater poet than Dante, no greater philosopher than Plato, no profounder novelist than Dostoevsky exists; yet, of course, they seem to me to have been hedgehogs, and although I do think that they were fanatical unitarians – and that this can lead to disastrous consequences in social, personal and political life – this is the price that may be paid for forms of genius which may well be profounder than any other. I may have more personal sympathy with foxes; I may think that they are politically more enlightened, tolerant and humane; but this does not imply they are otherwise more valuable – if such comparisons of incommensurables make sense at all.

To R. Errera of the publishers Calmann-Levy, 23 January 1973

The Hedgehog and the Fox – Le Hérisson et le renard: essai sur le philosophie d’histoire de Léon Tolstoi, which, whatever its merits, is, I suspect, the most widely read of all my books, both in England and in America […].

To Leon Edel, 17 September 1985

[T]he idea [in Edmund Wilson’s diary] that the last bit of my essay on Tolstoy is really autobiographical and that, ‘like all serious Jews’, I long to be a hedgehog is simply not true […].

Edmund Wilson had written:

I told [A. J. P.] Taylor, when it was over, that I had misunderstood Isaiah. ‘He’s very easy to misunderstand,’ said Taylor shortly and tellingly. I had not then seen, in the New Statesman, Taylor’s review of The Hedgehog and the Fox, which had rather cast a shadow on Isaiah. I talked to Taylor about the book as we were coming out of the lecture, and he said that he felt that Isaiah, when he couldn’t get into his subject, tried to carry things off ‘with a burst of words’, and that this was what he had said. There is something in this, I think – I had felt the evening before, when the conversation became philosophical, as I had sometimes felt with Isaiah before, that one feels him at moments scraping bottom when he has sailed into the shallows of his mind; but it is evident that Taylor, in the plain English tradition, cannot appreciate what they call at Oxford ‘the Delphic side’ of Isaiah, which is also the prophetic Jewish side. I thought that the end of the Tolstoy essay, which for Taylor is a mere torrent of words, was actually quite successful: he is talking about his own problems: he lives much the life of the fox but, like all serious Jews, aspires to the unity of the hedgehog.¹

A. J. P. TAYLOR’S REVIEW

Isaiah Berlin dwells in that strange borderland, the history of ideas, especially of ideas displayed in literature; and one sometimes feels that he has more ideas than all the historical authors whom he sets out to illuminate. Voltaire no doubt had him in mind when he wittily remarked, ‘it is neither literature nor ideas nor history’.² Something rather in the nature of an intellectual firework display, appropriately published in November, Mr Berlin is lavish with his gifts. In this little book of eighty pages, he starts enough themes to last another man a lifetime, though by now he is doubtless off on quite a different scent.

His essay treats ostensibly of Tolstoy’s view of history. But it starts with a penetrating idea on Tolstoy himself. Let us divide writers into hedgehogs and foxes. ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ The foxes chase after everything in the world, never aiming at a single point, never acquiring a single vision. The hedgehog is dedicated and dominated, for him everything must revolve round a centre. It is easy to agree that writers fall into the two classes of those for whom the heavens have opened and those for whom they have not. Pushkin, for example, was a fox; Dostoevsky a hedgehog. But what is Tolstoy? Mr Berlin gives a brilliant answer which carries him through most of his essay: Tolstoy was by nature a fox, who believed in being a hedgehog. He had an incomparable gift for creating a picture of real life, building it up from endless details of individuals and events; and when he was off his guard he sometimes implied that if we could know every tiny happening, we would understand the causes of events. But when he pulled himself up and became conscious, he regarded this view as wicked. Somewhere there must be the secret of the universe, which was more than the sum of its parts. This secret always evaded him; and he became the more destructive of the answers given by others, because he had failed to find one for himself.

The experienced reader of War and Peace will find this a convincing explanation. War and Peace is a work of propaganda, as well as the greatest historical novel ever written. It aims to show that men are never in control of events and indeed that the more they seek to control them, the more futile they become. Napoleon is the butt of War and Peace; Kutuzov, waiting for events to decide things for him, its saint. But Tolstoy cheated on the historical record, as Mr Berlin makes clear. He suppressed anything which told in Napoleon’s favour; and he drew a picture of Kutuzov which, as he himself knew, bore no relation to the real man. The Kutuzov of War and Peace is not a historical figure. He is a symbol of the truly wise man who senses the underlying nature of the universe. He is what Tolstoy wanted to be and never succeeded in becoming.

Where did Tolstoy get this doctrine of underlying truth from? This is the second of Mr Berlin’s ideas: he got it from Maistre. Mr Berlin shows that many of the historical details come from Maistre’s correspondence [sc. Soirées]. More than that, Maistre, the reactionary aristocrat, was sceptical of the modern world. He doubted all its values, yet he knew there was no going back. Tolstoy carried this forward into complete ‘negativism’.¹ He tore to pieces all the easy explanations of his contemporaries and hinted that he alone had the answer; yet he neither revealed nor even found it. This is a view of history only in a very abstract sense. The poor workaday historian is out of his depth. History is the record of how people behaved, and we ought to be content with it. At least it is all we have. If you want something more, you must ask the old-style philosopher, now almost extinct in this country. And at this point, Mr Berlin obliges us. The divine afflatus descends upon him. The sentences get longer and longer, the thought soars higher and higher, and what had begun as an essay in literary criticism ends as an utterance of the Delphic Apollo.¹

THE OWL AND THE PUSSY-CAT

John Bowle

With apologies to Mr Isaiah Berlin,

to the hedgehog, and to the fox

For those who will seek them out there are two kinds of animals said to frequent the English countryside.² On the one hand, strange two-legged creatures – round, fluffy, generally silent; predacious yet shy, airborne in a queer noctambulous way, credited by biologists with nocturnal vision, wise, ghostly, mysterious, detached; on the other, four-footed creatures, equally voracious; but sly, not shy; seasonally amorous and then vocal; endowed with queer self-sufficiency and even endearing charm, yet fundamentally and deeply involved in the ephemeral world of phenomena – strugforlifers,³ militant, engaged.

Into these divisions – the detached and the engagé – all the great philosophers may perhaps be divided. Hegel, of course, with his strange clouded eloquence, his vivid yet artificial metaphors – the Innigkeit of his Vierjahrzeitung, was indubitably an owl – an owl of Minerva, beneath whose wings the Weltgeschichte of the Weltanschauung went streaming and undulating,¹ twisting and turning in incredible and conscious spirals and swirling billows and baroque convolutions into an eternity of silence. But destined, just because of its inner urge, to contradict and transcend the earthly frustration which the other, polar,² animal symbolises. Du Plessis-Saaregemines, that feverish and unjustly neglected thinker,³ in contrast, was plainly a cat. From the taut and muscular upspring of his analytic prose – searching, profound, yet practical for an ice-cutting yet atavistic solution – from the feline determination to pursue the end by any means, from the padding of velvet paws which marks the lithe Gallic rhythm of his prose, from the precision of his negligent – yet quite accurate – pounce. Walking always alone along avenues of a profound introspection, yet preoccupied in a balanced ratio of constructive contradiction with brute fact, this astoundingly dim philosopher could always, with his sharp baleful insight, see the trees as well as the wood – even sense, pulsating beneath the autumn leaves his delicate tread would scarcely ruffle, the complex, elaborate but indubitably murine life to which he was the embodied fate.

Drawing by Edward Lear from ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’,

Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets (London, 1871)

If we may revert to our original contradiction, symbolised by these discrepant creatures, what is its meaning for us? Hegel or Du Plessis – or neither? If, in the sweep and acceleration of our argument, we take the simile, wring its neck, wring it out, ring¹ our bells, our hands and our hearts, what is the last drop of significance we may catch? It may well be this. Despite the profound contradiction between the Owl and the Pussy-Cat – the detachment, the fluffy, evasive, ovanescent, subjective, twilit, ephemeral quality of the Owl; the earth-bound, deeply sensual, tile-conditioned, cynical, objective mode of experience of the Cat – may we not find – as between Hegel and Plessis – some common affinity which distinguishes them both at least from ourselves? If this distinction can be made, the contradiction resolved, we may combine Hegel with Plessis, Kant with Hume, Bergson with Moore, Existentialism with Logical Positivism and the Dialectic with Pareto. Our entire speculation will have proved utterly and fruitfully relevant.

For if, in search of this something – common to them, yet not common to us – enjoyed by them but of which we are all a priori deprived, intuited by both, but to ourselves unattainable, we proceed, at night, into an obscure wood, what, within the experiences of Oblonsky’s body–mind, do we feel? We feel bewilderment, exhaustion, annoyance, irrelevance. Better far, we think, to remain within the confines of our native experience – in the world of gramophone and dictaphone, of heater and typewriter, of loofah and sofa. Better for us, we feel, as we stumble in the dark nocturnal haunts of both animals, the world of light. For in spite of our ingenuity, our empirically conditioned antecedents, our psychophysical intuition, our knowing sidelong insight, we are forced to conclude that in comparison with the Owl and the Pussy-cat – and with the philosophers they represent – we find, within that dark ambience which is their raison d’être, their modus operandi, their very mode of being and becoming, our own vision to be totally and utterly, happily and gloriously opaque.¹

STUCK THERE IN ALL SOULS

I went over to Oxford a couple of weeks ago to talk to the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who wrote that book on Tolstoy – the hedgehog one. I told him my conception of the movie [of War and Peace], and he said it sounded wonderful. He’d been going to give me a few minutes at 11 a.m., and at 4 p.m. we were still jabbering away. […] I told Berlin he was the showman, not me, and he told me I was the philosopher, not him. A great guy, and I don’t see how he missed. I mean, stuck there in All Souls.

Mike Todd¹

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF TALKING TO IB

IB It was a joke, you know; I never meant it seriously. There was a man called Lord Oxford, who is alive,² and a pious Catholic, living in the country, whom I knew in Oxford in the 1930s. He suddenly quoted the line from Archilochus which said that, and then we played games, late 1930s, about hedgehogs and foxes; and that’s how it came into my head, purely as a jeu d’esprit. […] And then I suddenly thought, in Tolstoy’s case, how he was a very good case of both.

29 April 1989

IB You say ‘Berlin appears to be a fox who wishes he were a hedgehog.’ Never have I wished that. Never. Why would you think that? I’m a fox who’s quite content to be a fox. That’s what I say about Tolstoy, that he’s a fox who thought he was a hedgehog; that’s rather different, and that’s what I’m accused of by Perry Anderson, of being a fox who is really a hedgehog, because I have got a large central idea, […] there is something unifying, and that’s quite wrong, but there’s something which I’m being accused of, whatever it is. […] What kind of a hedgehog am I in your view? What is my unitary vision, which I strive after? Not pluralism or liberalism, all these conflicting values and all the rest of it. That’s not an obsessive vision. I don’t reduce everything to that.

MI No, my point about you not being a hedgehog is the obvious one, that I don’t think someone who is a liberal pluralist can be a hedgehog, by definition. […] I meant something different by ‘hedgehog’: I think I meant […] a deep emotional interest in those who have a central vision, and a perplexity, a psychological interest in that kind of achievement.

IB Well, only because I’ve studied it, because Karl Marx was one and Tolstoy was one and so on; but no, I don’t think that’s right. I’ve got no either envy of or obsession by or terrible interest in people with a single vision; on the contrary, I think them very grand, important geniuses, but dangerous. […] I do think they can be geniuses of the first order. People who have a single vision of the universe, like Dante or Tolstoy […] – Tolstoy didn’t, in my opinion, but he wanted to – but there are people with this single view of the world, and they can be marvellous, but don’t tempt me, [n]or [do I] object to [them] terribly […]. I admire them and concede their importance or their genius. […] You must be thinking that I have somewhere a desire to put it all together. […] You might be right, because one doesn’t know oneself, but I’m telling you I never have felt a hedgehog in my life, or any temptation to be one. I’ve admired hedgehogs – Toscanini is a hero of exactly that kind. Akhmatova was a hedgehog. Oh, I’m impressed by them, I’m deeply moved by them, but not with them; and I don’t walk the same earth with them. [It’s a] leitmotif in my work – human desire for certainty is unshakeable, noble, incorrigible, highly dangerous; that’s all right. I don’t know about noble, I’m not sure it is; unshakeable, incorrigible and dangerous, yes; maybe it’s a case of noble noble, a case of ignoble ignoble. I don’t think Karl Marx was very noble: brave rather than dignified and worthy of respect. Noble?

29 April 1991

IB Then as a result of learning to dictate in Washington – I’ve always found it very painful to write – I began dictating here [in Oxford], and I found that infinitely easier; and so The Hedgehog and the Fox […] dictated in two days. That was because the Oxford Slavonic Studies [sc. Papers] – no, I had to deliver a lecture on a Slavonic subject, given to me by the Professor of Russian, whom I knew, Konovalov,¹ a fellow of New College; and I delivered the lecture. He said, ‘Well, if you can write that, I’d like to publish it.’ So I wrote it out, then he rejected it. It was not in time. And then somebody intervened and it was saved. It was then published as ‘Notes about the Historical Scepticism of Lev Tolstoy’ [sc. ‘Lev Tolstoy’s Historical Scepticism’]. It was never read by anybody in that form. […] Somebody must have told [George] Weidenfeld. He looked at it and thought it was publishable. […] And then Weidenfeld said, ‘It’s not quite long enough. It doesn’t quite – a pamphlet could be a little longer.’ So

I made it a little longer – added some more – and that was that.

5 June 1994

LATER COMMENTARY

The following extracts are culled from the editor’s archive of material about Berlin. No attempt has been made to locate especially interesting passages from the enormous secondary literature on Berlin’s essay (an exercise for another day, perhaps).

[Berlin] discovered that he was a hedgehog with one big central idea only because everyone else was telling him it was there.

Michael Ignatieff¹

‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog one big thing.’ Berlin made Archilochus’ line famous by using it as a metaphor to distinguish (I put it crudely) single-issue fanatics from those who welcome MacNeice’s ‘drunkenness of things being various’.² Steven Lukes offers a typology of Berlinian hedgehogs and foxes and places Berlin within it as ‘an empiricist, realist, objectivist, anti-irrationalist, anti-relativist fox’. Fair enough, though the endless discussion of where precisely to place Berlin on the erinaceous/vulpine continuum is, to quote Berlin’s own description of the result of pressing the distinction too far, ‘artificial, scholastic, and ultimately absurd’.

Henry Hardy¹

Berlin’s famous essay on Tolstoy, most noted (and cited) for its distinction between The Hedgehog and the Fox, is an analysis of Tolstoy’s vision of history; the essay’s power, its motivation and momentum, comes less from the opening metaphor than from Berlin’s insight into the struggle within Tolstoy between his own natural ‘sense of reality’² – that of the ‘fox’ who ‘knows many things’ and is honestly aware of the multifarious facets of life in all their distinctness, and which resists all attempts at simplification and systematisation – and his desire for a simple, unified, harmonious vision of life as a whole. This irreconcilable conflict between instincts and aspirations, which Tolstoy strove and failed to resolve, ultimately made Tolstoy a tormented, tragic figure, as Berlin powerfully explains in the essay’s magnificent conclusion.

Joshua Cherniss and Henry Hardy³

[Berlin] loved categorising individuals in the spirit of a party game. […] most often there were two categories and two alone: either you were, when it came right down to it, a conservative or a radical, shall we say; or you were either a hedgehog or a fox; or you were either a bishop or a bookmaker – he was inexhaustibly fertile in his ‘two sorts of’ distinctions. It gave rise to a joke against him: ‘The world is divided into two sorts of people: those who think the world is divided into two sorts of people and those who don’t.’

Bryan Magee¹

Perhaps the best-known phrase associated with Berlin’s view of the world and humanity is the one used as the title for his essay The Hedgehog and the Fox. It comes from a fragment of Greek poetry by Archilochus: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ As he applied this saying to the major actors of history, Berlin was not praising one beast and condemning the other. Everyone combines both, although in different proportions and interactions. In that sense, the proverb doesn’t quite work as a bumper-sticker for life – which is appropriate, since Berlin was wary of slogans and nostrums. He did, however, have one big idea of his own – his own personal hedgehog – and it was (also appropriately) paradoxical: beware of big ideas, especially when they fall into the hands of political leaders.

Strobe Talbott¹

AN EXCHANGE IN THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS²

Letter from John S. Bowman

The joint authors of the review of Isaiah Berlin’s writings refer to [an] oft-quoted phrase – in this instance, Berlin’s use of a fragment of Archilochus, the early Greek poet, for epigram [sc. epigraph], title and governing metaphor of his essay, ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’.³ As quoted by Berlin, Archilochus is saying: ‘The fox knows many little things. The hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Berlin then proceeds to compare Tolstoy, the ‘fox’, to Dostoevsky, the ‘hedgehog’, and before he is through, the Archilochus epigram seems to be saying that there are two different ways of approaching or knowing reality – put quite simplistically, the way of the far-ranging generalist and the way of the concentrated specialist.

As I admit, that is oversimplifying Berlin’s subtle arguments, but it is not my intention to accuse Berlin of anything. I do not even know who is responsible for the translation of the Archilochus that he uses. My point is that it is this reading of the Archilochus epigram that has held sway since Berlin used it many years ago: when people refer to ‘the hedgehog and the fox’ these days, they are usually referring to this contrasting approach to the world. Furthermore, there is a general disposition to favour the way of the fox – although this may be entirely my own bias. For instance, the reviewers of Berlin refer to his ‘pluralism’ and other aspects of our Western–liberal tradition that Berlin so epitomises, in a way that suggests we all are better for knowing a lot of things.

Again, that may be my own prejudice. At the very least we may allow that Berlin’s translation – and his thesis – award equal status to these two animals. Yet when we look closer at the original Archilochus, or rather at some other translations, the issue is not so clear. To begin with, ‘thing’ tends to become ‘trick’, and the ‘one big thing’ that Berlin’s hedgehog knows is how to curl itself into a ball to escape its enemies – including, presumably, the fox. There is thus the implied, if not explicit, suggestion that although the fox knows many tricks, it is the hedgehog with one ‘big trick’ that ends up defeating the fox. In this reading, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky would not just be taking different routes to reality: they would be in conflict – and Dostoevsky would outfox Tolstoy!

This version of the Archilochus is given its most committed translation by Guy Davenport when he first translates the original with what he states are the literal seven words: ‘Fox knows many, / Hedgehog one / Solid trick.’¹ Davenport then provides an alternate translation that he claims expresses the true thrust of the original: ‘Fox knows / Eleventythree / Tricks and still / Gets caught: / Hedgehog knows / One but it / Always works.’ Not all translators go this far, but others do imply that (1) the hedgehog’s trick is superior to the fox’s many tricks, and (2) the hedgehog’s trick may actually defeat the fox.

Nor is that the end of the problem. It has been suggested by at least one (hedgehoggy? foxy?) student of this matter that although the hedgehog may roll itself into a ball to elude the fox, it has been observed in nature that a fox may roll said hedgehog down a slope into water, where the hedgehog will either drown or be forced ashore to be killed by the fox. Your reviewers of Berlin may be hinting at this when they write that ‘an ironist would remark’ that the one big thing that the hedgehogs of this world know is ‘that there is not, or should not be, any hedgehog’s thesis about human affairs to expound’. (Note that it is the fox’s way, again, that is being favoured.)

But I am willing to call a halt at such convolutions. My question is really quite straightforward: Do any readers of this journal have any solid thoughts to offer on this topic? As to why we all should be concerned, it is because the Berlin version of the Archilochus is referred to several times a year in journals such as this – in the sense, that is, that there are two different ways of knowing reality, not fighting enemies, and that both ways are of at least equal value. Certainly we should all want to know what this allusion is based on.¹

Whatever the response, I do not expect ever to see the end of this (mis)representation of Archilochus […].

John S. Bowman

Northampton, Massachusetts

From the reply by Jonathan Lieberson and Sidney Morgenbesser

Mr Bowman seems to be correct that the Archilochean fragment is compatible with diverse interpretations, as several Greek scholars of our acquaintance have assured us. Indeed, an allusion to the ancient secular tradition of ‘practical knowledge’ (or, better, the cunning of knowing how to ‘get on’ in the world) seems to be contained in the fragment, which would suggest that the hedgehog does indeed ‘compete’ with the fox and does know the one ‘solid’ trick that the fox does not – as the translations of Guy Davenport (cited by Mr Bowman) and François Lasserre would indicate.² Thus, we fear the most that can be said about the Archilochean fragment is that there is no one transparently correct interpretation of it – only many different risky ones.

But in his charming and serious letter Mr Bowman raises or implies a number of questions about pluralism, reality and knowledge, only some of which can be addressed here. Some readers have taken our article to suggest that Berlin supports a currently fashionable view – sometimes called ‘pluralism’ – that at any given time scientists possess a number of theories that are mutually inconsistent but that, in light of the available data, are equally plausible, and that they enjoy the luxury of picking and choosing among them, whether on grounds of simplicity or ideology or aesthetic considerations. We think this interpretation of Berlin is based on a misreading of his work. His qualified defence of Vico and Herder commits him, it is true, to the pluralistic thesis that diverse cultures may each have their own ways of interpreting human experience. But this pluralistic thesis applies within history and the humanities, and is not the extreme relativistic view we have just outlined. Berlin is not claiming certainty for Vico and Herder, but he does think their views are more plausible than those of better-known thinkers such as Descartes and Voltaire and their modern successors.

Berlin is often interpreted as maintaining that the methods of the humanities and social sciences are not applicable to the subject matter of the natural sciences. He is said to hold that the historian may (or does) acquire knowledge by special acts of understanding or Verstehen. He makes no such claim. As we argued, Berlin is defending a number of separate theses which require distinguishing among such locutions ‘knowing that something is the case’, ‘knowing how to do something’, ‘knowing what it is to be something’ and so on. Berlin also calls our attention to the diverse cognitive skills that are needed, not only to confirm hypotheses, but even to understand them. We suggested some qualifications of Berlin’s views, but even if our qualifications are overlooked or rejected, we believe that he is best interpreted as holding, at most, that there are some ways of knowing some realities and alternative ones for knowing other aspects of other realities, and not the view implied by Bowman that there are alternative ways of knowing ‘reality’. […]

Reply by Isaiah Berlin

Mr Bowman in his polite and charming letter says that he accuses me of nothing, but nevertheless implies that my English version of Archilochus’ line about the fox and the hedgehog may have misrepresented his meaning; and adds that he does not know who is responsible for the translation. The facts are these: when I first came across the line in question in Diehl’s well-known edition¹ (to which I was led by a passage about Archilochus in one of Herder’s literary essays),² it seemed to me to be prima facie suitable as an epigraph to an article on Tolstoy’s view of history which I was then thinking of contributing to an Oxford periodical (I ought to add that the original title of the essay was ‘On Lev Tolstoy’s Historical Scepticism’;³ the present title was suggested by the publisher of it in book form).⁴ Since I am not a Greek scholar, I turned for advice on the exact meaning of the line to the three most authoritative Greek scholars personally known to me – Eduard Fraenkel, Maurice Bowra and E. R. Dodds – and asked them whether the most obvious meaning given by translators, some of whom Mr Bowman cites – that while the fox has many tricks, the hedgehog knows one, which protects him against all the fox’s stratagems – was the only valid meaning.

All three scholars, Fraenkel and Bowra by word of mouth, Dodds in a postcard (which, alas, after a quarter of a century, I cannot find) told me that the meaning of the fragment was not clear: that it might indeed mean what Mr Bowman (and I) supposed it to mean; but that the literal translation proposed by me seemed to them equally possible; and that consequently I should be justified in using it as an epigraph to my thesis on Tolstoy’s epilogue to War and Peace. Dodds added ‘little’ to ‘things’, and I accepted this.¹ Needless to say I did not for a moment wish to suggest that such concepts as the one and the many, or monism and pluralism, or the ideas of Parmenides and his critics, could have been present in any form to the mind of Archilochus. I used his isolated line as a peg on which to hang my own reflections: the metaphor of hedgehogs and foxes was not, I warned the reader, to be driven too far; it was intended, at most, as an opening to my central theme – a hypothesis about the psychological roots of Tolstoy’s historical outlook. Still less did I mean to imply that foxes were superior to hedgehogs; this was (and is) not my view. I made no judgments of value. If Mr Bowman is right (whether he is I have no way of telling), and I have indeed misled the unwary about the meaning of a line in Archilochus, I can only plead in extenuation that I acted on what was the best advice obtainable by me at that time; and that if no more than the name of this writer – one of the earliest of European poets whose physical existence is not in doubt – has thereby been made known to many who might otherwise never have heard of him, that could, perhaps, be regarded as something to set against such doubts as Mr Bowman and others may feel about the soundness of the opinions on this topic of my eminent consultants.

I should like to take this opportunity to thank Mr Sidney Morgenbesser and Mr Jonathan Lieberson for their explanatory letter, with every word of which I entirely agree.

Isaiah Berlin

Oxford, England

CONCLUDING EDITORIAL NOTE

New light has more recently been cast on the possible meaning of the fragment by Ewen Bowie,¹ who suggests that the line may come from a poem in the form of a dialogue between Archilochus and a woman he is trying to seduce. The line would be spoken by the woman, who is saying that the fox (Archilochus) may have many seductive wiles at his disposal, but she (the hedgehog) has one decisive device in her armoury, to curl up into a ball, preventing him from entering her (at any rate frontally). The Greek word for hedgehog may also have been used to refer to the female genitals, which would support this interpretation. Bowie’s hypothesis is based on two papyrus fragments (first published in 1954 and 1974) in which an iambic poem is built around a conversation between Archilochus and a woman he is seducing.¹ That Archilochus is presented as the fox rather than the hedgehog is suggested by his apparent identification of himself with a fox in poems exploiting the fable of the fox and the eagle (fragments 172–181) and that of the fox and the ape (fragments 185–7).

Bowie’s hypothesis is reported in an article by Paula Correa, which concludes sagely: ‘For those who try to read [the fragment] today out of context, it rolls itself up like a hedgehog, and perhaps not even with all cunning may one disclose some of its meaning without doing it violence.’²

¹ Interviewed in February 1993 for Andreas Isenschmid’s ‘Isaiah Berlin: Ein Porträt’, broadcast on 24 September 1993 by Swiss Radio DRS, Studio Zürich, channel DRS2.

¹ Actually Oxford Slavonic Papers.

² Maistre did not in the event appear in the subtitle.

¹ Edmund Wilson, The Fifties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period, ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1986), 139.

² Untraced.

¹ See 11 above.

¹ ‘Thoughts on Tolstoy’, New Statesman and Nation, 12 December 1953, 768.

² See Boguslavski, Bogomoff and Bor, Ocherki po izucheniyu prirody zhivotnykh cheloveka (Yogurt Press, Tashkent, 1936). [The spoof Russian title means ‘Essays on the study of the nature of man’s animals’.]

³ [‘Incidentally did you know that in French there is a charming French word ‘life-struggler’? it is a good clear concept, & I am not sure you don’t rather like that.’ IB to Jenifer Hart, 25 February 1936.]

¹ ‘Steaming and perambulating’ in the alternative, but possibly corrupt, text.

² Not to be confused with bears.

³ Discovered in the recesses of the Third Programme by Professor Knout.

¹ Or ‘wring’?

¹ Punch, 24 February 1954, 264.

¹ The filmmaker Mike Todd of Todd-AO, ‘The Talk of the Town’, New Yorker, 15 January 1955, 20. A card to IB from Fred(erick) Rau dated 23 January 1955 comments: ‘You should be more careful who you talk to & avoid Mr Todd in future.’

² He died in 2011: see also 15/3.

¹ Sergey Konovalov (1899–1982), Professor of Russian, Oxford, 1945–67.

¹ ‘Berlin in Autumn’, in Michael Ignatieff and others, Berlin in Autumn: The Philosopher in Old Age (Occasional Papers of the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, 16) ([Berkeley, 2000: Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities]), 15. Cf. George Crowder, Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism (Cambridge, 2004), 148.

² Louis MacNeice, ‘Snow’, end of second stanza, which begins: ‘World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural.’

¹ ‘Thoughts of Taj Mahal will leave you as drunk as a fox’, review of Mark Lilla, Ronald Dworkin and Robert B. Silvers (eds), The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin (New York, 2001: New York Review Books), Times Higher Education Supplement, 30 November 2001, 24–5. The quotation from Lukes is on p. 21 of that book, and that from Berlin on pp. 2–3 of this one.

² See x/2 above.

³ ‘A Philosophy for Our Time’, AllLearn (Alliance for Lifelong Learning) online course on IB, 2005.

¹ ‘Isaiah As I Knew Him’, in Henry Hardy (ed.), The Book of Isaiah: Personal Impressions of Isaiah Berlin (Woodbridge, 2009), 53.

¹ Foreword to Isaiah Berlin, The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism, ed. Henry Hardy (Washington, 2004), xiii.

² 25 September 1980, 67–8 (Bowman, Lieberson and Morgenbesser); 9 October 1980, 44 (Berlin).

³ Jonathan Lieberson and Sidney Morgenbesser, ‘The Choices of Isaiah Berlin’ (the second part of a two-part review of Against the Current), New York Review of Books, 20 March 1980, 31–6, at 36.

¹ [Carmina Archilochi: The Fragments of Archilochus (Berkeley, 1964), 64. In transliteration the fragment runs ‘poll’ oid’ alpx, all’ ekhnos hen mega’; in the same order the words mean ‘many [things] knows fox, but hedgehog one big/great [thing]’. The solidity and trickery are entirely plausible, but not literal.]

¹ [A very full account of possible interpretations is now available in the article by Paula Correa cited below (114/1).]

² Lasserre established the text of Archiloque: Fragments (Paris, 1958), but the translations are by André Bonnard, who on p. 54 renders this fragment: ‘Il sait bien des tours, le renard. Le herisson n’en connaît qu’un, mais il est fameux.’

¹ [Ernst Diehl (ed), Anthologia lyrica graeca (Leipzig, 1923–5). IB here omits to mention what he reports elsewhere (e.g. 101 above), that it was Asquith who first drew his attention to the fragment.]

² [Possibly a reference to Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–91), part 3, book 13, chapter 5, ‘The Scientific Practices of the Greeks’, where he writes: ‘Where are the many lost pieces of Archilochus […]?’]

³ In fact ‘Lev Tolstoy’s Historical Scepticism’: see xi above.

⁴ George Weidenfeld of Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

¹ [He did not, however, add it to his translation.]

¹ Personal communication, 2012. See also Paula Correa, ‘The Fox and the Hedgehog’, Phaos 1 (2001), 81–92 (see 90–1), revised as ‘A Raposa e o Porco-Espinho (201)’ in id., Um bestiário arcaico: fábulas e imagens de animais na poesia de Arquíloco (Campinas, 2010), 163–78 (see 175–8); and Luca Bettarini, ‘Archiloco fr. 201 W.: meglio volpe o riccio?’, Philologia antiqua 2 (2009), 45–51 at 49.

¹ West, op. cit. (1/2), fragments 23 and 196A.

² ibid. 91 (178).